‘Normal’ cholesterol: to treat or not to treat?

Much ado with a new paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine . This study was placebo controlled and focused on treating people with ”normal” cholesterol but a high “c-reactive protein” (a marker of inflammation) with rosuvastatin (which is not a new statin as some media outlets have reported, but one already in use). Reports have been rather enthusiastic, eg from the Daily Telegraph: ” risk of a heart attack was reduced by 54%”. One doctor is reported as saying it’s “astonishing”. The trial was stopped early due to “remarkable” results.

The problem is that although the “54%” looks marvellous, and is true, this is the relative risk reduction, not the absolute risk reduction. It does not, by itself, give us a true picture of how meaningful this reduction in cardiovascular events is. We have to know what our risk of having such an event was to start with. From “table 3″ in the paper, the number of patients in the rosuvastatin group was 8901. The number of heart attacks in this group was 31. The placebo group was also made up of 8901 people. The number of heart attacks in the placebo group was 68. The chance of this group of people having a heart attack on placebo treatment was 68/8901, or 0.76%. The chance of the other group of people, those on rosuvastatin, having a heart attack were 31/8901, or 0.35%. Thus, if you have a normal cholesterol but a high CRP, and if you take rosuvastatin, you can have a 0.35% chance of having a heart attack as opposed to a 0.76% chance.

I’m not very impressed. The other problem with this trial is that it was stopped early. Thus we don’t know what the long term benefits or problems of this approach were (article on this here) . And there did seem to be a small increased risk of developing diabetes in the rosuvastatin group.

However, there may be something else going on here. I mentioned the thought-provoking book The Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick a while ago. He says, effectively, that cholesterol is nothing to do with heart disease. Statins seem to have some effect on outcomes, but probably have another way of working which has nothing to do with cholesterol, but something to do with inflammation.